On Coase’s Two Famous Theorems

Sad news today that Ronald Coase has passed away; he was still working, often on the Chinese economy, at the incredible age of 102. Coase is best known to economists for two statements: that transaction costs explain many puzzles in the organization of society, and that pricing for durable goods presents a particular worry since even a monopolist selling a durable good needs to “compete” with its future and past selves. Both of these statements are horribly, horribly misunderstood, particularly the first.

Let’s talk first about transaction costs, as in “The Nature of the Firm” and “The Problem of Social Cost”, which are to my knowledge the most cited and the second most cited papers in economics. The Problem of Social Cost leads with its famous cattle versus crops example. A farmer wishes to grow crops, and a rancher wishes his cattle to roam where the crops grow. Should we make the rancher liable for damage to the crops (or restrain the rancher from letting his cattle roam at all!), or indeed ought we restrain the farmer from building a fence where the cattle wish to roam? Coase points out that in some sense both parties are causally responsible for the externality, that there is some socially efficient amount of cattle grazing and crop planting, and that if a bargain can be reached costlessly, then there is some set of side payments where the rancher and the farmer are both better off than having the crops eaten or the cattle fenced. Further, it doesn’t matter whether you give grazing rights to the cattle and force the farmer to pay for the “right” to fence and grow crops, or whether you give farming rights and force the rancher to pay for the right to roam his cattle.

This basic principle applies widely in law, where Coase had his largest impact. He cites a case where confectioner machines shake a doctor’s office, making it impossible for the doctor to perform certain examinations. The court restricts the ability of the confectioner to use the machine. But Coase points out that if the value of the machine to the confectioner exceeds the harm of shaking to the doctor, then there is scope for a mutually beneficial side payment whereby the machine is used (at some level) and one or the other is compensated. A very powerful idea indeed.

Powerful, but widely misunderstood. I deliberately did not mention property rights above. Coase is often misunderstood (and, to be fair, he does at points in the essay imply this misunderstanding) as saying that property rights are important, because once we have property rights, we have something that can “be priced” when bargaining. Hence property rights + externalities + no transaction costs should lead to no inefficiency if side payments can be made. Dan Usher famously argued that this is “either tautological, incoherent, or wrong”. Costless bargaining is efficient tautologically; if I assume people can agree on socially efficient bargains, then of course they will. The fact that side payments can be agreed upon is true even when there are no property rights at all. Coase says that “[i]t is necessary to know whether the damaging business is liable or not for damage since without the establishment of this initial delimitation of rights there can be no market transactions to transfer and recombine them.” Usher is correct: that statement is wrong. In the absence of property rights, a bargain establishes a contract between parties with novel rights that needn’t exist ex-ante.

But all is not lost for Coase. Because the real point of his paper begins with Section VI, not before, when he notes that the case without transaction costs isn’t the interesting one. The interesting case is when transaction costs make bargaining difficult. What you should take from Coase is that social efficiency can be enhanced by institutions (including the firm!) which allow socially efficient bargains to be reached by removing restrictive transaction costs, and particularly that the assignment of property rights to different parties can either help or hinder those institutions. One more thing to keep in mind about the Coase Theorem (which Samuelson famously argued was not a theorem at all…): Coase implicitly is referring to Pareto efficiency in his theorem, but since property rights are an endowment, we know from the Welfare Theorems that benefits exceeds costs is not sufficient for maximizing social welfare.

Let’s now consider the Coase Conjecture: this conjecture comes, I believe, from a very short 1972 paper, Durability and Monopoly. The idea is simple and clever. Let a monopolist own all of the land in the US. If there was a competitive market in land, the price per unit would be P and all Q units will be sold. Surely a monopolist will sell a reduced quantity Q2 less than Q at price P2 greater than P? But once those are sold, we are in trouble, since the monopolist still has Q-Q2 units of land. Unless the monopolist can commit to never sell that additional land, we all realize he will try to sell it sometime later, at a new maximizing price P3 which is greater than P but less than P2. He then still has some land left over, which he will sell even cheaper in the next period. Hence, why should anyone buy in the first period, knowing the price will fall (and note that the seller who discounts the future has the incentive to make the length between periods of price cutting arbitrarily short)? The monopolist with a durable good is thus unable to make rents. Now, Coase essentially never uses mathematical theorems in his papers, and you game theorists surely can see that there are many auxiliary assumptions about beliefs and the like running in the background here.

Luckily, given the importance of this conjecture to pricing strategies, antitrust, auctions, etc., there has been a ton of work on the problem since 1972. Nancy Stokey (article gated) has a famous paper written here at MEDS showing that the conjecture only holds strictly when the seller is capable of selling in continuous time and the buyers are updating beliefs continuously, though approximate versions of the conjecture hold when periods are discrete. Gul, Sonnenschein and Wilson flesh out the model more completely, generally showing the conjecture to hold in well-defined stationary equilibrium across various assumptions about the demand curve. McAfee and Wiseman show in a recent ReStud that even the tiniest amount of “capacity cost”, or a fee that must be paid in any period for X amount of capacity (i.e., the need to hire sales agents for the land), destroys the Coase reasoning. The idea is that in the final few periods, when I am selling to very few people, even a small capacity cost is large relative to the size of the market, so I won’t pay it; backward inducting, then, agents in previous periods know it is not necessarily worthwhile to wait, and hence they buy earlier at the higher price. It goes without saying that there are many more papers in the formal literature.

(Some final notes: Coase’s Nobel lecture is well worth reading, as it summarizes the most important thread in his work: “there [are] costs of using the pricing mechanism.” It is these costs that explain why, though markets in general have such amazing features, even in capitalist countries there are large firms run internally as something resembling a command state. McCloskey has a nice brief article which generally blames Stigler for the misunderstanding of Coase’s work. Also, while gathering some PDFs for this article, I was shocked to see that Ithaka, who run JSTOR, is now filing DMCA takedowns with Google against people who host some of these legendary papers (like “Problem of Social Cost”) on their academic websites. What ridiculousness from a non-profit that claims its mission is to “help the academic community use digital technologies to preserve the scholarly record.”)

I am not sure that costless bargaining solves the problem if we don’t assume away violence/conflict. In that case, can’t we treat the existence of property rights as shorthand for a claim that a mechanism has been established to credibly force the participants to negotiate on a non-destructive basis? I realize that one can always define “costless” so the argument is genuinely tautological but I often wonder if property rights is in fact doing more work than we realize. This is analagous to Coase’s original point in the Theory of the Firm, that accessing the price mechanism is not costless. Similarly, institutionally stable property rights are not costless and assuming they exist goes a long way to removing one of the most critical transactions costs in bargaining.

Coase gives the make-work economist’s response for the econs’ simplistic fantasy world: decide all issues through price-based valuation. To his cattle v. crops example, he concludes “The nature of the choice is clear: meat or crops. To give another example, … Stigler instances the contamination of a stream. If we assume the harmful effect of the pollution is that it kills the fish, the question to be decided is; is the value of the fish lost greater or less than the value of the product which the contamination of the stream makes possible.”

I think it far more likely that ‘our chronic woes’ are due to a failure to realize that there are trade-offs that have to be made (outside the world of the blackboard). That, and that prices are usually the most efficient way to measure those trade-offs.